BY AMANDA CUDA
Hearst Connecticut Media
Yale-New Haven Hospital will set up shop inside Milford Hospital, running a 24-bed inpatient rehabilitation unit on a floor of the facility.
The new unit is expected to open in May and will treat patients who need extra time or services to recover from surgery and other procedures.
The new partnership is neither a merger nor an acquisition, and will allow Milford to remain independent while also drumming up extra business for the hospital.
Yale New Haven Health System, which operates Yale-New Haven Hospital as well as Bridgeport and Greenwich hospitals, has clinical partnerships among its hospitals. For instance, Yale-New Haven Children”™s Hospital runs a 20-bed unit at Bridgeport Hospital.
But this will be the first instance of Yale taking over a chunk of space in a hospital that is not part of its health system, said Yale-New Haven spokesman Vin Petrini.
“This is a little bit of an out-of-the-box way of thinking,” Petrini said. He added that unconventional partnerships like this are “a byproduct of what’s happening in the health care environment right now.”
Hospitals across the nation are looking at ways to increase efficiency without depleting services, and hospitals in Connecticut are no exception.
In 2012, Yale-New Haven acquired another New Haven-based hospital, the Hospital of Saint Raphael. Other partnerships include Norwalk Hospital’s recent decision to join Danbury and New Milford hospitals as part of the Western Connecticut Health Network.
Officials at Yale and Milford see the collaboration as a way of solving problems for both hospitals. On Yale’s side, Petrini said the Milford Hospital unit will be a place for less serious cases, freeing up Yale doctors to focus on more complicated patients at the main campus.
Meanwhile, Milford Hospital, one of the few remaining hospitals in the state that isn’t part of a chain, has struggled financially for years. The hospital’s financial statement from fiscal year 2012 showed Milford operating roughly $1.8 million in the red.
The 2013 financial statement wasn’t available, but Milford Hospital spokeswoman Karen Kipfer said in an email that “Milford, like hospitals across the state, has continued to face financial challenges and the burdens of declining inpatient volume and historic cuts in Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement.”
She said the hospital approached Yale about a possible partnership in an attempt to address some of those challenges.
“The intent of this innovative collaboration is to enhance access to care in a way that benefits both organizations while preserving the independence of Milford Hospital,” Kipfer said.
The Yale unit will increase traffic at the hospital, Kipfer said, and provide a new source of revenue as it will be using many of the hospital’s services, including laboratory facilities and pharmacy services.
Given the project will largely use existing facilities, Petrini said the cost of the new unit is expected to be minimal.
Yale’s rehabilitation unit will be set up in an area that is already used for inpatient medical and surgical services, but Kipfer said she does not expect adding the Yale unit will affect the hospital’s existing services. “We are not displacing anything but rather adding a new service, which will increase access to needed care in our community,” she said.
Hearst Connecticut Media includes four daily newspapers: Connecticut Post, Greenwich Time, The Advocate (Stamford) and The News Times (Danbury.) See ctpost.com for more from this reporter.
